The joy of sets

Film has spent more than a century trying to replicate life. Today, with
digital technology and handheld cameras, we're close to a cinema that walks,
talks and (soon, my pretties) smells like reality.

And yet while mainstream film makers strive to make dinosaurs live and family
drama painfully authentic, others have wallowed in the fictitiousness of it all
with campy, painterly sets and gloriously silly musical numbers.

Step up Dr Seuss, classic children's author, creator of The Cat in the
Hat and The Grinch, and, in 1953, cooriginator of one of the
oddest creations to come out of Hollywood. The 5000 Fingers of Dr T may
not be a classic. It may not even be that good. But, boy, does it have a big
piano. It also has at least one remarkable influence on contemporary culture -
the film's villain, piano teacher Dr Terwilliker, persecutes a boy called Bart,
a struggle referenced by Bart Simpson's enemy, Sideshow Bob Terwilliger, in
The Simpsons.

Like The Simpsons, The 5000 Fingers of Dr T is set in
American suburbia. Young Bart is tormented by Dr Terwilliker's piano lessons and
endless hours of tedious practice.

Falling asleep at the piano, Bart has a dream that takes up most of the film.
In it, Dr Terwilliker becomes a cruel villain who plans to dominate music
teaching the world over by making 500 boys play the same piece of music
simultaneously on a giant piano - 5000 happy fingers, belonging to boys
imprisoned in his academy. He has sinister henchmen, a ruthless readiness to
kill and a Svengali-like power over Bart's mother - and only one little boy can
stop him.

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But, most of all, Dr T's music academy has visual excess. It's a fantastic,
joky amalgam of Flash Gordon, The Wizard of Oz and more recherche
European art films - explicitly and emphatically in its title as well as design
- such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

The 5000 Fingers of Dr T is a conscious parody-homage to a certain
tradition of hand-painted cinema. While Hollywood was searching for ways to make
people forget themselves and accept the fantasy world before their eyes, to be
transported to ancient Babylon or the wild west, early European film makers were
more inclined to make the fantastic nature of cinema more explicit.

Visual art was crucial to both traditions. The realist spectacle of D.W.
Griffith and his Hollywood successors owed everything to the studied, detailed
naturalism of 19th-century academic painting.

The meticulous luxury of early American recreations of the past such as
Ben Hur is deeply indebted to painters such as Jean-Leon Gerome, who
delighted 19thcentury audiences with realistic recreations of ancient Rome. The
conventions of film realism are those of Victorian painting with the glossy,
spectacular reproduction of historical scenes.

And mainstream Hollywood today is in the 19th century more than ever. Ridley
Scott's Rome in Gladiator is full of precise recreations of
19th-century realist-spectacular painting, his Senate and Colosseum sets
directly influenced by painters such as Gerome and Thomas Couture.

Painting was always integral to the studio system, and legions of artists
worked on the backlots in the classic studio era to create a painted Camelot,
New York, Atlantis and Last Chance Saloon. In Nathanael West's 1939 Hollywood
novel, The Day of the Locust, artist and trainee set designer Tod
Hackett finds himself adrift among the different mirage worlds of a studio
backlot: ``The only bit of shade he could find was under an ocean liner made of
painted canvas with real lifeboats hanging from its davits. He stood in its
narrow shadow for a while, then went on toward a great 40-foot papiermache
sphinx that loomed up in the distance.''

The point about this painted world of American cinema was that it aspired to
pass for reality. Like naturalistic painting in the 19th century, it wanted (and
still wants) to become invisible as art, to be accepted as real.

European avantgarde film makers in the early 20th century, however, rejected
the conventions of Victorian naturalist painting. Influenced by modern art, they
made the painted, constructed nature of the film world explicit. The most
dramatic example of this is The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, the 1920 German
silent horror film whose somewhat confusing plot involving doubles and
somnambulism is staged in a visibly unreal world of painted sets derived from
German Expressionist art.

All jagged lines, sweeping perspectives and Gothic architecture, the sets of
Dr Caligari make no attempt to suspend disbelief or create a reality on
screen. They invite the eye to feast on fiction, to enjoy an Expressionist
painting that moves.

In Hollywood, this alternative tradition had its fans - campy intellectuals
and Europhile aesthetes - but in the 1930s and '40s it was relegated to two
genres, the musical and the horror film. Both were playgrounds of the fantastic,
holidays from naturalism.

When the classic studio era ended and Hollywood struggled to reinvent itself
in the 1960s, all this stuff at the edge of American cinema's naturalist
landscape came streaming to the centre. It was the era of camp oddities par
excellence, such as Barbarella and Roger Corman's hallucinatory horror
films.

The cinema of painted fantasy is pastiched and parodied in The 5000
Fingers. But why?

Like the musical and horror, the children's film is a landscape of play where
anything goes.

But maybe Dr Seuss had something more specific in mind in introducing
allusions to art films and exploring the nature of unreality.

Perhaps he wanted to make a film free of realist cant - a film that prepared
young audiences for filmgoing by pointing out that film isn't real, that what
you see can be deceptive. And that you should always beware of piano teachers.